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Topic: Software Hall of Fame (Read 22937 times)

Ever so often, I see the usual suspects of lists like 'best products in IT-history' or the 'Biggest tech flops' pass by, but I almost never see those rankings for software, unless it is a summary of the best 'freebies of 20..'. It's like everyone uses programs, and then erases from their collective memories when the next OS/major software update comes along. So I was wondering: do you guys have any programs any mind that deserve Hall of Fame-status? The ones you used on older operating systems, the ones that were ahead of their time, or the ones that radically changed the way you use your computer? Especially in the early nineties, as that period precedes my own fond memories...I'm real curious. Hope this is the right place to ask

RagTimeSolo:Way too advanced for the days it came out (around 2000). Practically the complete MS-Office experience in one program (including DTP!), where you could use all functionality (text, database, spreadsheet) in one and the same document.

Stuff that revolutionised my life: in the late 80's, WordStar IV. (WS3 was still a bit too CP/M.)

In the 90s, DESQview/386 (ie the version that included QEMM). dBase IV in one window, WordStar 6 in another, and SuperCalc V in a third and you can take Windows 3.1 and shove it where the sun don't shine. Learn-and-replay keyboard macros. Multitasking on a PC before anyone else could get close. I can't bring myself to throw it away, either, although I know that box will never be opened again...

And how could I forget SpinRite, by the Heavenly Steve Gibson?

In the 00s, Directory Opus. (I know, but I spend a LOT of time playing in filesystems.)

In the 10s... probably too soon to say. My favourite things are mostly browser-based -- like Lastpass, and Speed Dial. I'm falling in love with Sagelight, although my first loves for Things Graphical are all made by Serif.

AutoHotKey's starting to look like a keeper, too.

Also... the agenda, database and contacts applications built into my old and much missed Psion 5mx were (a) superb and (b) still unmatched, anywhere. (I keep thinking about paying for the Pro version of Essential PIM just to give me an excuse to complain at the developers until they've replicated the Psion experience.)

- Turbo Pascal: revolutionized programming (for both hobbyists and pros). Affordable, fast, and one of the first (if not actually the first) IDE's. - Windows 3.0 Enhanced mode: Real multi-tasking of your MS-DOS programs, mixed in with the new-fangled GUI stuff - Mosaic Internet browser: made the internet/web accessible to the hoi polloi.

JavelinPlus - radically powerful financial modeling software frequently mistaken for a spreadsheet. I used this extensively when it first came out back when I was in corporate financial planning. I have yet to see anything that comes close to it in terms of design or functional elegance.

Javelin encourages viewing data and algorithms in various self-documenting ways, including simultaneous multiple synchronized views. For example, users can move through the connections between variables on a diagram while seeing the logical roots and branches of each variable. This is an example of what is perhaps its primary contribution—the concept of traceability of a user's logic or model structure through its twelve views. Among its dynamically linked views were: diagram, formulas, table, chart, QuickGraph, worksheet, notes, errors, macro, graph. A complex model can be dissected and understood by others who had no role in its creation, and this remains unique even today. Javelin was used primarily for financial modeling, but was also used to build instructional models in college chemistry courses, to model the world's economies, and by the military in the early Star Wars project. It is still in use by institutions for which model integrity is mission critical.

Javelin received multiple awards, including: "Best of 1985" for technical excellence from PC Magazine[1]; "Most Significant Product" from PC Week; and "Software Product of the Year".[2] 'The Infoworld award apparently created some consternation in the top ranks of number two Microsoft:'

"Then there was the year Microsoft's new Windows spreadsheet, Excel, was up against start-up Javelin Software's Javelin spreadsheet for InfoWorld Product of the Year. Although Excel was a beautiful extension of the existing spreadsheet concept, Javelin had imaginative features, says Michael McCarthy, InfoWorld reviews editor from 1984 to 1990 and current publisher of IDG's San Francisco-based Web Publishing Inc., producers of JavaWorld and SunWorld. "I persuaded InfoWorld to give Javelin Product of the Year," McCarthy says. "At the InfoWorld dinner at Comdex, when they gave out the award for Product of the Year and Excel came in second, Bill Gates got up and stomped out of the room in front of everybody in a spectacularly rude manner." "Backstage: InfoWorld's movers and shakers By Scott Mace http://archive.infow...8ann.backstage.shtml

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Ronstadt's Financials - Brilliant!, brilliant!!, brilliant!!! business financial planning tool and book set. I planned my very first startup using this software. I've used it with several other businesses I've been involved with as well. Good 1989 Inc.Magazine article about the product and it's creator here.

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TurboPascal - time was, if you wanted to write your own "real" programs, "TP three-oh-two" was what you used. (Still available for free download courtesy of Borland!)

Business programs benefited from the BCD edition (originally extra $$$, later incorporated into a single release) which avoided floating point arithmetic hassles by providing binary coded decimal real number math capabilities.

From the README.TXT file:

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WELCOME TO TURBO PASCAL 3.0 ---------------------------

This file contains important information not found in the ReferenceManual. Included is information on how to get technical help, adescription of differences between Turbo Pascal 2.0 and 3.0,corrections to the Reference Manual, and a complete list of files onthe distribution disk. Since this file contains information importantto you, please read it in its entirety; hopefully it will answer anyquestions you may have.

Special Note: Turbo Pascal now comes complete with three versions ofthe compiler. The standard compiler: TURBO.COM, the compiler withsupport for the optional 8087 math coprocessor: TURBO-87.COM, and thecompiler with BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) real number support for precise,business oriented computations: TURBOBCD.COM. Simply recompile yoursource code with one of the compilers to take advantage of the optionalreal number support. Please note that to use TURBO-87.COM you musthave an 8087 coprocessor chip installed in your computer. Mostcomputers do not come with the 8087 chip installed.

- Turbo Pascal: revolutionized programming (for both hobbyists and pros). Affordable, fast, and one of the first (if not actually the first) IDE's.

It generated pretty lousy code, but it was a great language to develop in back then, and Borland IDEs were amazing when you were learning programming; integrated help was great. And the capability of compiling directly to RAM and bypassing the disk subsystem was a godsend for fast modify/compile/test cycles, disk was slow

You were smart enough to use DESQview and QEMM, bt you fell for SpinRite? O_o

You never needed to reinterleave an MFM HD, I take it? Spinrite was

I grant it lost a lot of its usefulness once RLL drives came along, and IDE and subsequent technologies have made it a niche "recover from low-level errors" thing that I think I've only ever needed to suggest somebody use once in the last decade or so, but I still appreciate the quality of the program -- from a distance.

This was our Internet before there was an Internet. (Note: FidoNet is still around too!)

Strictly speaking, you don't mean the Internet, you mean the web. The Internet started in the early 70s, and FidoNet was -- what, 1985?

From that viewpoint, I'd add Silver Xpress, FrontDoor and Portal of Power to the list. The first got me understanding what Fido was all about, and the latter two ran my point system and my BBS, in that (chronological) order. (No, I know most readers here won't know what on earth we're talking about. Move on, move on!

Fido knew how to do message quoting, too. UseNet standards -- the ones we mostly all use now -- are far nastier.

Strictly speaking, you don't mean the Internet, you mean the web. The Internet started in the early 70s, and FidoNet was -- what, 1985?

Actually, I did mean the Internet in that I was referring to Fido's behavior as a 'network of networks' communicating under a commonly shared protocol; as opposed to 'the web', which I always took (perhaps erroneously) to refer to the global collection of linked hypertext documents accessible via the Internet.

But some of my definitions date to 'way back when' so they could well be obsolete by current standards.

(And you're correct. Most people will have no idea what we're talking about. But that's good in a way. Because that meant they missed out on all the aggravation (even if they also missed out on all the "fun") of running a Fidonet node. Onward! )

Because it cost the users (and most of the sysops) real money to send and receive every character, the Fido standard was designed to focus on clarity and conciseness. The standards exist in Usenet too but the costs are borne elsewhere and the upshot was -- mostly, anyway -- that messages were quoted in their entirety below the response.

Different Fido message editors handled things differently; my favourite (Xpress) did quotes very well, retained initials of initial posters in messages that were more than a conversation just between two people, and actually seemed to encourage the "selective quoting" that allowed the sensible ones to just quote relevant text (and the mischief-makers to use quotes to make different points to what the poster actually meant but hey, nobody's perfect and it was usually for humorous purposes )

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I agree that some of the current ways are totally messy.

Outlook's got a lot to answer for. Although I can only think of one email client that gets some way towards "proper" quoting -- The Bat! -- and one other -- Thunderbird -- that can be persuaded to work nearly as well as The Bat with some effort. And an addon.

As an ex-echo moderator (and briefly and scarcely in any important way an ex-Regional Echomail Controller) I do my best to keep to the standards Fido taught me when emailing and writing in fora but it's FAR harder than it ought to be. Odd: Fido was organisationally anarchic but internally totally standards-driven and mostly compliant; the Internet's almost the exact opposite. Maybe there are some clues there...

Actually, I did mean the Internet in that I was referring to Fido's behavior as a 'network of networks' communicating under a commonly shared protocol; as opposed to 'the web', which I always took (perhaps erroneously) to refer to the global collection of linked hypertext documents accessible via the Internet.

No, in that sense you're quite right. Although Fido was -- AIUI -- modelled on the internet as it then was, and therefore couldn't have predated it.

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Because that meant they missed out on all the aggravation (even if they also missed out on all the "fun") of running a Fidonet node. Onward! )

Hah. It WAS fun. Even when it wasn't, the choice to NOT do it always existed, so it MUST have been fun.

Fabrice Bellard's freeware LZEXE, circa 1989 - the first program I ever saw that could convert .EXE files to smaller .EXE files which unpacked in memory before running the same as before. End users were running this on programs even if the developer had not. Imagine how many apps (yes, that word was around in the DOS days) you could fit on a 720KB diskette! The UPX of its day, and possibly the first one. More about Fabrice Bellard on Wikipedia

Vern Buerg's LIST - a DOS file viewer of around the same era, I think. No more type filename.ext|more! The program also came with a command line tool FV.EXE to see the contents of archive files. Very handy! Oddly, he doesn't have a Wikipedia page. (Sadly, Vern Buerg passed away in 2009.)

Alpha Four (smooth as silk DOS relational database with prompts that made sense)PC Tools (great disk repair utility, one version of it even included a flat file database program)DR DOS 5 and 6, and Novell DOS 7 (Introduced new features like disk compression, caching, and virtual drives that forced Microsoft to do the same with MS-DOS) Plus its version of fdisk did not require a subsequent format. Magic!Turbo Pascal (version 2 or 3?) provided to me on a 5.25" diskette. A compiler that produced real executables and came with a built-in IDE that made writing compiled code as easy as writing interpreted code.

There was a full screen freeware text editor called "e" that loaded lightning fast because it was compiled to a .COM file, which back then that meant it was non-relocatable by the OS and therefore had less overhead. Your assignment now is to find a web search engine that will let you search for "e".

Also add Borland's Sidekick - the sui generis app that launched the DOS "TSR revolution" (with all the problems going down that road ultimately caused ) before we had personal systems capable of having more than one thing loaded at a time - because DOS (despite the name) was more a "command processor" rather than what we today consider to be an operating system.

Sidekick was a genuinely useful little productivity app collection. I found myself using it constantly.

And the NANSI.SYS and NNANSI.COM enhanced console drivers for DOS! These little beasties boosted screen performance and provided additional features when using EGA/VGA monitors. If you were a heavy spreadsheet user, this was an absolute must have for the improvement in scrolling speed alone. The 50 line display option was also a gift from heaven. Either of these puppies was one of the first things every "power user" worthy of the name loaded onto his or her machine.